The current art supports various methods to execute electronic search and commerce transactions, including on-line retailing and search engine sites that place potential vendors before potential buyers based on search criteria or advertisement sales. However, in the current art, the known characteristics of the potential buyers are rather limited (e.g., search keywords) and of only limited use to match potential business partners.
In some arrangements, search engines require login accounts so that users can enter their own demographic data or search preferences. However, such implementations then depend on personal data being stored by the search engine provider, and users can choose to describe themselves inaccurately. Thus, the searchers are not anonymous, and they may not truly match the characteristics desired by the potential business partners. Furthermore, there are currently no means for a community (e.g., an enterprise) to present its aggregated community as a buying bloc to potential on-line business partners.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for matching buyers and sellers in an anonymous online marketplace.